Optimizing the Comment Experience

Peter Prestipino

Posted on 11.18.2010

Commenting on the content of others is one of the great hallmarks of Web
marketing. Not only do you get to participate and share your thoughts with
others, but you have the opportunity to generate exposure for your own brand
simultaneously. With great rewards, however, comes great risk. Those without the
proverbial savvy to engage in a meaningful way (we're looking at you, spammers)
put the entire commenting ecosystem in jeopardy. Follow along with these five
general rules of engagement for commenting (on your own website and others) and
you'll pleased, very pleased, at the results.

Five Rules of Engagement for Commenting

- Participate in the Conversation: If someone has taken the time
to write something and you have taken the time to read it, it seems like a waste
to go off-topic, right? While it's easy to say "great article", it is far more
meaningful to say "great article - here is why". Even a brief note on how the
topic impacts you or how you believe it might impact or influence others is
valuable to the entire commuinty.

- Reward Positive Contributions: Every so often, someone will leave
a comment on content that will be profoundly interesting. Should that occur on
your own website/weblog, reward that positive contribution. Whether it comes in the form of recognizing the comment through another comment or
actually reaching out via email just to say thanks, rewarding positive
contributions shows that you are not just listening but also appreciative of their
interest and participation. Rewarding positivity will set the tone and encourage
repeat visits and greater interaction over time.

- Punish Disruptive Behavior: Much like you need to reward positive
contributions, you also need to punish disruptive behavior. If you are the
commenter, nothing good comes out of flame wars and posting offensive,
threatening and inflammatory rhetoric. As the website operator, you must curtail disruptive
behavior with great swiftness. While it's easy to install
Akismet or other spam-fighting solutions, do engage in IP banning should things
get out of hand. Remember that things indeed can get worse; curtailing negative
behavior immediately and without question should be the rule.

- Provide Supporting Data/Arguments: While opinion should be
allowed, providing supporting data (and encouraging it if you are the website
owner) should be on the minds of anyone leaving a comment. It's one thing to say
that things should be a certain way and explain why, and something immensely
more valuable to show some proof. Whether it is something simple like a link to
a Google Trends or Yahoo Clue report or sharing snippets of more in-depth
research, everyone benefits when commenters provide supporting data.

- Declare Personal Interest: Transparency was the term du jour many
years ago and it should still be an important rule to live by. If you represent
a particular company or interest, being honest about your affiliations at the
outset will prevent others from finding out and exposing you.

While the default comment systems in most content management systems are
perfectly viable, there are many more powerful alternatives you just might want
to consider.

IntenseDebate is a
comment system that can be added to any site including WordPress, Blogger,
Tumblr and others. The platform enables users to reply and moderate comments via
email, and its threading feature (nested replies) makes it simple to follow the
conversation. One of the best features of IntenseDebate is the rich user
profiles as the platforms provides a reputation score of sorts for commenters.
Comment history and comment voting are some additional benefits of using
IntenseDebate, in addition to its powerful administration tools and social
commenting features that enable readers to post comments by signing in through
services like Facebook, Twitter and OpenID.

Disqus is a popular commenting
platform, similar to IntenseDebate, which can support sites both large and
small. To say Disqus is "feature-rich" is an understatement - inline media
embedding, support for mobile websites, social integration and powerful tools
for moderation and spam control. Perhaps the best feature, however, is that Disqus
enables site owners to bring the conversation back to their site by collecting
Tweets, mentions and other reactions from across the Web. That means that even
if someone does not actually comment on your post or page (instead doing so on
Twitter), it will still appear as if they did. Disqus is immensely popular and is now
being used on nearly 500,000 sites.

As an Internet marketing professional, however, you should realize that as
important as comments are to the community of your Web property, you'll need to
get out and engage in the conversation away from your site as well. Commenting can
be a time-consuming endeavor; fortunately, there are a few tools to make the
process simpler.

coComment is a
long-running service with some 280,000 sites and it helps Web marketers manage,
power and research conversations on the Web. The service enables the discovery
of conversations that are connected to individuals, tags, sites and groups.
Users can then track any comment in the network wherever they occur and
coComment summarizes everything in a single location. Integration is very simple
and plugins (and platform specific code) are available for WordPress, Blogger,
TypePad and Movable Type.

co.mments is another
service to consider for tracking comments. While not nearly as robust as
coComment, those looking for a simple yet powerful system will be pleased with
co.mments.com. After signing up for the service you will be able to bookmark
conversations you find interesting, track conversations and comments that occur
(users can check up on new comments, remove conversations and add their onw),
and follow them by subscribing to a personalized tracking feed that can be
viewed in a feed reader or email. Very simple but very useful.

Ready to comment? Start here!

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comment platforms we have shared above with other Website Magazine readers.